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Venture Capital

Cassie McGrath

Healthcare Brew delivers the latest news and trends in healthcare.

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More than 20 hospital systems around the US have venture arms that invest in healthcare companies either founded internally by clinicians or externally by experts in the industry.

 is to build products the hospital needs, and hopefully bring in some ROI to uplift finances.

In 2013, New York-based Northwell Health launched Northwell Holdings, which has since used internal funds to spin out a joint company creation platform with Aegis Ventures called Ascertain in 2023 and robotics company Clarapath in 2021.

Richard Mulry, president and CEO of Northwell Holdings, spoke with Healthcare Brew about how the venture arm chooses its investments, the benefits it brings to the health system, and his thoughts on the future of healthcare innovation.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What sort of companies do you invest in? And are they often internal or external to the health system?

The answer is both. We have over 100,000 employees now, so invention can happen across the enterprise. Some of it’s from our clinical faculty, and others are from our team members. Some of our physicians have developed intellectual property around medical devices, sometimes around therapeutics. They present those through a normal tech transfer process, and then we would try to see if there’s a way that we can either help them bring that solution to market or if there’s a way that we can assign that IP over to them and help seed or fund the company, and then allow the company to proceed out into the market with us as an equity shareholder.

We do invest in outside companies. We probably receive over 2,000 inquiries a year from outside startups that want to receive some form of investment, but also the partnership that Northwell offers.

Lastly, we’ve really started to foray into creating our own companies. We have all of this expertise; we wanted to make sure that we were not only investing in but creating solutions.

How do you decide what companies you invest in? And how many companies do you invest in?

For every 300 companies we look at, we may invest in one. We’ll do a first-pass evaluation with our subject-matter experts. For instance, is this really disruptive? Do we think that it meets a need? Does it do something better or faster? And does it represent an opportunity to have financial return? So if it meets those criteria, it will go into a deeper diligence [process].

How does the venture arm support hospital finances?

One example is preauthorization, and when patients are in transitions of care—so a patient’s going to leave the hospital and go to a nursing home, for example—[Ascertain] took that process down from 150 clicks to almost six clicks. It saves a lot of time on that end, so our team can spend more time either working the exceptions of what criteria they still need to fulfill in order to get that transition to occur, or they spend more time with the patient’s families.

Not only does it help with efficiency, meaning we’d have to hire far fewer employees to do that than we would if we just scaled it linearly through a manual process. Also, it’s a better patient experience, and it’s a better provider experience.

What innovations are you excited about in the healthcare industry generally?

 because we feel that that’s a very, very important area to develop—both on the administrative and clinical sides—that can make vast differences in the way that we can deliver services. We’re also seeing great need in the market and great advancement in 

. There’s a company [we invested in], for example, called Cognixion that helps translate basically brain waves into speech for patients that might be suffering from a speech impediment because of ALS, stroke, or for another reason.

Healthcare Brew Q&A series featuring Richard Mulry.

How Northwell Holdings operates, according to its CEO

Hospitals are spinning out startups, bringing in new tech and ROI. 

illustrated headshot of caroline catherman, healthcare brew reporter

Caroline Catherman

For decades, women’s health was underfunded and poorly understood.

Women weren’t required to be included in NIH research until 1993, according to its Office of Research on Women’s Health. And the American Heart Association did not establish that women’s symptoms of heart disease differed from men’s until 1999.

“Our current healthcare system is largely built for and by men,” Neel Shah, chief medical officer of Maven Clinic, a telehealth service for women and families, told Healthcare Brew.

Symptoms of conditions like perimenopause and menopause were dismissed as a “normal part of aging,” Joanna Strober, founder and CEO of Midi Health, a virtual care clinic for women in midlife, told Healthcare Brew.

But over the last 25 years, the landscape has shifted. In 2006, for instance, the FDA approved the first vaccine against HPV, which can cause cervical cancer.

Though problems remain, industry executives like Strober and Shah told Healthcare Brew that younger women’s advocacy and openness has helped turn the tides and increase 

“When your eyes are failing, they don’t say, ‘Oh, it’s a normal part of aging.’ They give you contacts or they give you glasses,” Strober told Healthcare Brew. “I’m really proud of younger women who are saying, ‘Actually, no, it’s not OK. I don’t want to suffer.’”

Despite affecting billions around the world, women’s sexual and reproductive health issues receive far less funding and attention than men’s.

 from the World Economic Forum in conjunction with the nonprofit McKinsey Health Institute found from 2019–2023, startups addressing endometriosis raised $44 million worldwide while those targeting erectile dysfunction pulled in $1.24 billion—six times more.

But investors are increasingly realizing women’s health is an untapped market opportunity, particularly in the digital realm.

 from the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, US venture capital investments in women’s health tech companies peaked in 2021 with $629 million and 39 deals.

Investments altogether fell in 2022, but in 2023, women’s health was once again going strong with $481 million and 21 deals.

Midi Health, founded in 2021, served 100,000 women in 2024 and raised $63 million in a Series B round, according to PitchBook. Maven, founded in 2014 and valued at $1.7 billion, announced it had secured $125 million in Series F funding in October 2024.

“Women’s health has been under-resourced and under-investigated, and now there’s a big opportunity in the marketplace to serve half the population that has been underserved in the past,” Strober said.

Some women’s health companies are pushing the digital model even further.

Unlike Midi and Maven, which take insurance and provide telehealth consultations before prescribing treatment, Well Health’s Wisp—launched in 2018—operates on a direct-to-consumer, cash-only basis. Patients fill out an online symptom survey, receive a diagnosis for conditions like UTIs or bacterial vaginosis, and have medications shipped to their door or pharmacy. Some can even do it without a telehealth visit, though the site notes medical providers can follow up by phone or chat.

The tradeoff? Providers on the platform need to refer out for complex cases—like signs of a serious infection—but it’s fast and consumers are on board, Wisp CEO Monica Cepak told Healthcare Brew.

“Women are much more empowered today to take control over their health through diagnostics and telemedicine,” Cepak said.

In August 2024, Well announced in a press release that Wisp had served 1 million+ patients and had a revenue run rate of over $78 million.

But hurdles remain. Women’s health accounted for just 2% of $41.2 billion in healthcare venture funding in 2023, according to Deloitte’s analysis.

Women’s health also gets less research funding. 

 in the Journal of Women’s Health found that only one of 12 diseases that primarily impact men—liver cancer—got too little NIH funding with respect to disease burden in 2019, but 14 of 23 diseases that primarily impact women were underfunded.

Plus, services like fertility treatments remain costly and undercovered by insurance, per KFF research, and thus inaccessible to many. In 2024, an average in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle costs between $15,000 and $30,000, 

“When it comes to women’s health, we’ve made real strides,” Shah said. “Of course, we have such a long way to go.”

But he and other startup leaders are confident change will continue as investors catch on. McKinsey and the World Health Economic Forum projected 

 medication has a market potential of $120 billion–$230 billion globally. Treatments for endometriosis, which affects an estimated 190 million women worldwide, according to the report, have a market potential of $180 billion–$220 billion.

“We’re proving that this can be a big market,” Strober said.

Stephanie S. McDonough gets an injection of Gardasil vaccine, which prevents HPV, from Debra K. Lillington at the Reading Hospital.

Women’s health was overlooked for decades. Not anymore

After years of being ignored, women’s health is becoming a hot market for innovation and investment.

Maia Anderson

 are founded globally—but roughly 90% of them eventually fail.

Given the deluge, you may wonder how investors wade through the waters to find the gems. 

Julie Yoo, a general partner who joined the Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) bio and health fund team in 2019, walked Healthcare Brew through her process for vetting and working with healthcare startups. A16z is one of the largest venture capital (VC) firms in the world and manages $45 billion.

The health and bio team focuses on early-stage companies and typically invests in seed or Series A rounds, Yoo said, adding that checks range from $1 million to $50 million. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What does your startup vetting process look like from the first meeting to investment?

When we partner with companies at the seed stage, the vast majority of what we index on is the founder. We always seek to meet founders as early as possible in their journey.

Some things we evaluate are: How deeply has this individual really dug into all the things that could go right and all the things that could go wrong about building a business in this space? If they have super high conviction and highly opinionated answers for why previous companies who tried this failed, they’re going to have a competitive advantage relative to incumbents.

What’s your approach to working with portfolio companies?

We always say that we invest in such exceptional entrepreneurs that they’re likely to be successful whether or not we’re involved. That said, one of the very unique aspects of our firm is that we do have this platform that enables our companies to have a competitive advantage post-investment in the market. The thesis is, how do we grant these typically first-time entrepreneurs access to networks and expertise that would otherwise take them years to build on their own from day one, so they have that edge in the market?

What are your portfolio companies working on right now?

A lot of our companies are taking somewhat provocative approaches to AI.

We have companies in the administrative automation space, applying AI to the rote tasks that are below the pay grade of the humans doing them. We have companies like Akasa that are using generative AI for revenue cycle automation, and we’ve got Turquoise Health that’s using AI for price transparency and contract management.

And then we have companies that are using AI for clinical applications, where doctors are treating patients and using these tools in real-time patient care settings, like Ambience Healthcare, an AI scribe product that ensures the patient/provider encounter is properly documented.

We’re also seeing a ton of innovation around the consumer as a primary user of these novel AI products. An example is Hippocratic AI, which has deployed what they call a “super staffing platform” of AI nurses that are able to engage individuals 24/7 for long conversations. They have had explosive growth in the course of the last few months.

I genuinely believe that healthcare is the industry that will benefit the most from this wave of generative AI, and I believe these are some of the early examples of us seeing that play out.

Healthcare cross symbols floating against binary code background. Credit: Morning Brew Design

How a16z’s Julie Yoo decides which health tech startups are worth investing in 

A16z’s Julie Yoo has helped the firm invest in health tech companies including Hippocratic AI and Turquoise Health. 

How an a16z healthcare investor decides which companies to bet on

Digital health has become a crucial sector of the healthcare industry, with companies leveraging technology for everything from 

 patients’ risk of developing heart disease to creating 

Researchers from digital health strategy group and venture fund Rock Health took a look back at where investors put their money in the digital health field in 2024. They found that venture capital (VC) firms are largely favoring early-stage startups and sticking to tried-and-true areas like artificial intelligence (AI). The report also found that major funds like Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z and General Catalyst are gaining more influence.

In 2024, US-based digital health startups raised a total of $10.1 billion in 497 deals, according to Rock Health’s January 13 

. That’s slightly down from 2023 when startups raised $10.8 billion in 503 deals, and is almost the same amount they raised pre-pandemic in 2019 ($8.2 billion in 425 deals) when accounting for inflation.

The decrease in dollar amount can largely be attributed to the fact that investors are favoring smaller, early-stage deals as opposed to late-stage funding rounds that tend to have larger check amounts, according to the report.

Adriana Krasniansky, head of research at Rock Health’s advisory arm, told Healthcare Brew that investors favor newer startups because they have more room for new players to come in and gain equity in the company.

Most of 2024’s digital health funding (85%) went to popular areas including AI, disease treatment, and streamlining workflows, according to Rock Health’s analysis.

Of the startups focusing on disease treatments, the most funded were those focused on mental health, cardiovascular disease, oncology, obesity, reproductive health, and diabetes. 

Startups focused on AI got 37% of the year’s total digital health funding, accounting for 191 deals. 

One of the most notable trends to come out of 2024 is how bifurcated the space is becoming, Krasniansky said.

On one hand, there are a lot of new small startups 

 investors. But at the same time, the digital health field has matured enough that it’s starting to see some large influential players raising huge funding rounds from big names like a16z and General Catalyst, according to Krasniansky.

For example, in February 2024, a16z participated in a $70 million Series B round for Ambience Healthcare, a company leveraging AI to streamline clinical notetaking. And General Catalyst has put millions into Commure, a company working to automate provider workflows. General Catalyst this month also 

 health benefits startup Transcarent’s acquisition of another benefits company, Accolade, for $621 million.

The mega funds (or VC firms that have assets of at least $500 million) are becoming more influential across digital health, according to Rock Health’s report. A16z and General Catalyst were top investors in the sector last year.

This trend of mega funds becoming more influential in digital health follows a broader movement of capital being concentrated among a few major firms. PitchBook data 

 that 75% ($49 billion) of capital VC firms raised in 2024 came from 30 of the 391 VC firms in the US, and just nine firms made up 50% ($35 billion) of total capital raised.

Looking forward, early-stage startups are “going to have to learn how to play around these players and not just compete,” Krasniansky said. “That changes a lot of dynamics when it comes to how a startup thinks about exiting and how it thinks about its total addressable market.”

hospital symbols with up arrows on a blue grid background

How digital health VC funding evolved in 2024

Big-name funds like a16z and General Catalyst are becoming more influential in the space. 

Welcome back to AI 411, a monthly roundup of artificial intelligence (AI) announcements from across the healthcare industry.

This month, Massachusetts-based health system Mass General Brigham announced a 

 to help detect more cases of long Covid and collect more data about how prevalent the condition is. Meanwhile, some critics are accusing 

, an AI scribe that takes notes for clinicians, of adding into transcripts words that patients and providers never said. 

With AI’s popularity growing in healthcare, we put together some of the headlines we thought our dear readers would be interested in from November.

Tenet Healthcare, a 52-hospital network based in Dallas, Texas, has selected AI scribe company Commure as its ambient listening technology to take clinical notes for Tenet Physician Resources, the company’s physician network.

Last month, the largest health system in the US with 186 hospitals—Nashville, Tennessee-based HCA Healthcare—also formed 

 with Commure to provide AI scribe services.

 On November 25, New York City-based Mount Sinai opened the Hamilton and Amabel James Center for Artificial Intelligence and Human Health, an organization created to research and develop AI tools for healthcare. Some of these initiatives include the Windreich Department of AI and Human Health, which is designed to find ways to 

 into the eight Mount Sinai hospitals, as well as the Institute for Genomic Health and Division of Medical Genetics that 

PatientsLikeMe, a health management company, announced a partnership with health tech company Ubie on November 13. Ubie has an AI Symptom Checker tool that gives patients information about existing health conditions and directs them to relevant providers. As part of the partnership, PatientsLikeMe plans to use its platform to connect patients living with the same medical conditions so they can share resources and experiences.

Ambient listening tech company Suki announced two new partnerships on November 20 with electronic health record (EHR) companies Medent and Azalea Health. Suki had previously announced that it would work with two other EHR companies, Athenahealth and Meditech, in an effort to embed its AI scribe into more EHRs.

With a $500,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health, researchers at the University of Houston plan to use AI to reduce health disparities and improve health outcomes for marginalized patients. The team aims to specifically look at cardiometabolic conditions like diabetes and heart disease, which are among the leading causes of death around the world and affect Black and Latino adults in the US at higher rates. Using AI, the researchers plan to review audio, video, and biometric sensor data to create personalized care plans and help patients make lifestyle changes.

AI scribe Upheal announced a $10 million Series A round led by venture capital firms Headlinebringing the startup’s total funding to $14.35 million. Upheal works in mental health care and has introduced features like group-based note sharing and custom note-taking templates.

Another AI scribe entered the chat when the Veradigm Ambient Scribe went live on November 21. The technology was created by health tech companies Veradigm and AvodahMed to aid clinicians with documentation.

Healthcare Brew monthly series on AI Startups

Here’s a roundup of AI news in healthcare for November 

From diagnosis to documentation, these are some of the latest AI announcements in healthcare. 

AI 411: November 

We keep our fingers on the pulse of who’s moving where in the healthcare world, from small startups bringing in new leadership to big orgs trading seasoned execs. Each month, we highlight some of the major job changes in the healthcare sector.

Spoiler: There’s another CVS leadership change afoot.

Here’s a noncomprehensive roundup of the past month’s career shifts.

Have a job announcement to share? Drop Caroline or Cassie an email at 

 As the newly appointed CEO of Valo Health, a tech company working to accelerate drug discovery, Alexander will also be CEO partner at parent company biotech venture capital firm Flagship Pioneering with Craig Williams.

 Telehealth platform Hims & Hers appointed Autor, a former FDA deputy commissioner, to its board of directors.

CVS Health hired Chaguturu as its next president of healthcare delivery, which includes the urgent care Minute Clinic, Oak Street Health primary care services, home care provider Signify Health, and its health plan Aetna.

Boston-based LGBTQ+ health center Fenway Health named Ducar, former founding CEO and president of Transhealth, as its next EVP for donor engagement and external relations.

Substance-use management digital health provider Pelago appointed Jennings as president.

Therapy startup Two Chairs appointed Keim as its inaugural CFO.

Mirvie, a startup that’s working to create a blood test to predict if patients are at risk of health issues during pregnancy, hired McElrath, a professor at Harvard Medical School, as VP of clinical development.

Morris was hired as chief medical officer for AI scribe Ambience Healthcare. He previously worked at Google and Cleveland Clinic.

 Mirvie also appointed Newcomer as senior advisor on market access.

The Clinic by the Cleveland Clinic, which provides virtual second opinions for patients, appointed Peter as chief medical officer.

Abridge, which uses generative AI to support clinicians in note-taking, hired Queiroz as its first-ever chief product officer.

 Ryan was tapped as Temple Health’s new chief human resources officer. He will continue to serve as EVP and general counsel at the Philadelphia-based health system.

global head of quality and safety at Hims & Hers.

Williams, the new CEO of Apriori Bio, a vaccine and antiviral drug developer that makes treatments to protect against viruses, has simultaneously been appointed a CEO partner at Flagship Pioneering with Brian Alexander.

Zangerle was named SVP and chief nurse executive of the American Hospital Association (AHA) as well as CEO of AHA’s American Organization for Nursing Leadership, a professional development organization for nurses.

Healthcare Brew's August on Rotation editorial feature

Here are November’s biggest executive moves

Executive changes in pharma, hospitals, and startups shook up leadership this month.

On Rotation: November 2024

An estimated $23 billion of Medicare dollars are spent each year on hospice care.

 found that care quality can be linked to care center ownership, with not-for-profit hospice outperforming for-profit services.

And for-profit facilities in the space are growing. In 2010, 53% of hospice facilities were for-profit, growing from 2,300 to 3,500 over a 10-year span, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. By 2020, that share jumped to 70% of 5,200 facilities analyzed, 

Private equity (PE) ownership has also been on the rise at hospice facilities. Between 2015 and 2022, 47 PE firms bought 124 hospices, a report out of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai found.

Meanwhile, quality of care is not always up to snuff, with the US Department of Health and Human Services raising concerns in 2023 about patient neglect and abuse. Generally, according to the 

 (DOJ), about 10% of people over 65 in the US experience elder abuse each year, 5.1% of which is due to caregiver neglect.

Of the 2,676 US-based hospice facilities reviewed for the study, 705 (23.5%) were PE-funded or publicly traded; 1,203 (40.1%) were for-profit, but not publicly traded or PE-backed; and 768 (25.7%) were not-for-profit.

The facilities included in the study comprise 87% of Medicare beneficiaries who received hospice care in that time period, according to the study. About 80% of the patients in the survey were on Medicare, study author and Emory University doctoral candidate Alex Soltoff said in an email, and some patients had private insurance or other plans.

Researchers from Emory University School of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center collaborated on the study to review data between January 2021 and December 2022 from the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, a government agency that surveys hospice patient families or caregivers via phone calls and mail.

Respondents rated the centers based on eight metrics, such as timeliness of care, communication quality, and if the patient in hospice was treated respectfully.

Not-for-profit hospices ranked first across all eight metrics, receiving a score of 83.1 out of 100. For-profit—but not PE-backed or publicly traded hospices—got a score of 81.2, while PE-backed and publicly traded hospices came in with 79.8 points.

These estimates place not-for-profit hospices in the 56th percentile for all hospice facilities and for-profits in the 47th percentile. PE/publicly traded facilities fall “substantially below” the national mean at the 34th percentile, Soltoff said.

“These findings raise questions as to how patients are affected when [private equity] and [publicly traded companies] own hospices and suggest the need for greater transparency and accountability of hospice ownership,” the study’s authors wrote.

Caregiver holding an elderly patient's hand at their bedside